29 May 6 Reasons to Grow Your Weed in a Greenhouse

In some areas of the country, particularly the “Emerald Triangle” of Southern Oregon and Northern California, you can’t drive down a country road without spotting the telltale framing and poly of large greenhouses dotting the countryside.

What is it that is making growing in greenhouses so popular?

Essentially, they’re the perfect balance between an indoor and an outdoor grow. Consider these six benefits of growing cannabis in a greenhouse.

1. Control the Light

One of the benefits of an outdoor grow is that sunlight is free. Greenhouse growing also utilizes this free sunlight, but can take it a step further by supplementing the plants with light on overcast or cloudy days when the plants need a bit of a boost.

In a greenhouse, you can also play with the spectrum of light you’re providing. For example, you can use a grow light with an emphasis on the blue spectrum to optimize the vegetative stage or something with a heavy red spectrum to encourage the flowering stage.

2. Control the Climate

Producing a high-quality product is all about controlling the environment. Like an indoor grow, a greenhouse also protects your plants from the elements, but at a much lower cost per square foot. If you have an automation system in your greenhouse, that’s made even easier. You can control temperature, ventilation, and more with just a touch of a button. That level of control is impossible to reach in an outdoor grow, when Mother Nature might decide to throw disastrous conditions your way at any moment. In a greenhouse, you’ll rest easier knowing that your crop is protected from the storm blowing through, or that you don’t have to worry about a rainstorm coming in right before your harvest.

3. More Harvests in a Year

You can dramatically increase your yield when you add a light deprivation system to your greenhouse. This setup, sometimes called a “blackout system,” includes thick curtains that completely block the light hitting the plants in your greenhouse. This allows you control the length of daylight your plants experience. By altering this schedule, you can encourage your plants to flower regardless of the season, giving you a huge advantage over outdoor growers.

4. More Reliability

Once you know exactly what environmental inputs your strains need to flourish, you can easily produce those effects harvest after harvest. Growing in a greenhouse allows you the kind of consistency that you can’t get from an outdoor grow. This is particularly important when consumers have come to expect a particular profile out of your buds. A bad batch can be not just disappointing to your customers but can cost you money in lost sales.

One way to get a jumpstart on figuring out which strains are best for you is by purchasing your seeds from a website such as I Love Growing Marijuana. Reviews and ratings from farmers who have already grown and harvested the seeds can be extremely valuable in your decision-making process.

5. Cost Savings

The startup costs of an indoor grow can easily reach $100/square foot or more. Investing in a new greenhouse will be significantly lower, usually around half of that.

You’ll save on ongoing costs with a greenhouse, as well. It’s incredibly expensive to reproduce the power of the sun, which is essentially what indoor grows are attempting to do. Greenhouses harness that power for free, allowing you to simply make smaller, less expensive tweaks to ensure that the plants are getting the light they need.

6. Security

Although greenhouses aren’t exactly stealth, they do keep the plants away from prying eyes of neighbors and passersby. This won’t take the place of a comprehensive security plan that may include cameras, fencing, and patrol, but it is a big step up from an outdoor grow. For additional security at your greenhouse grow site, consider steel end walls, cameras, motion detectors, and fencing.

The Big Picture

Growing cannabis in a greenhouse strikes a balance between the benefits of indoor and outdoor grows. Greenhouses are significantly more cost effective than indoor grows, but still provide all the same environmental control and reliability benefits. Like outdoor grows, greenhouses can harness the free power of sunlight. In many ways, greenhouses really are the best of both worlds for growing marijuana.